User names for both users and businesses, enabling other users to connect via a simple URL: m.me/yourusername.

Messenger Links, which enable users who click on the URLs mentioned above to immediately launch conversations with pages or businesses.

Messenger Codes, which users can scan with the cameras on their smartphones or tablets to launch threads.

Messenger Greetings, customizable notes that appear in those threads before messages are exchanged.

“Direct communication through Messenger and Facebook is fast and convenient for both people and businesses. And now, making it clear to people that your business is available to communicate directly through Messenger is even easier. These features will be available globally over the coming weeks. “

Google Is Testing Review Snippets in Local 3-Pack: Want to see reviews of a local business before you try it out? Google is testing out a way to make this easier for you to do! An additional line of text on the local packs you see in search results is starting to appear! Searchers will start to see a single quote from one review to show in the local pack snippet. With reviews holding such a high importance in buying decisions, this is an important update for many brands.

“Google is not picking a review from someone who has a lot of review submissions or is considered a local guide, but rather just a random review from someone who may have only left a few reviews in their lifetime on Google.”

Google Updates Search Quality Rating Guidelines: As of March 28, 2016 the search quality rater’s guidelines document from Google has been updated and reduced from 160 pages to 146. The previous version was released to the public in November 2015. The summary of changes include: De-emphasis of supplementary content, an emphasis on local (Visit-in-Person), importance of Mobile, and more!

“Back in November 2015, Google released a full version of their quality raters document, and this is the first published update to the public version since its release four months ago.”

Google AdWords Improves Shopping Product Insights: New insights such as product status and effective max CPC are now available in Google AdWords reporting columns. Being able to easily view if a product has been disapproved, excluded, or is out of stock can help reduce downtime of those products being served in the Shopping Network. The effective max CPC column shows the bid that you’ve set for products within product groups. Finally, the AdWords team has provided new inventory insights on the Product groups tab to easily see which products need to be updated.

“Now you can easily spot the status of your best performing products with the product status column. Product status will help identify items that have stopped attracting traffic and conversions because they are disapproved, excluded or out of stock.”

Bing Ads Has Added New User Roles: These new roles give advertisers new options when inviting users to help manage Bing Ads accounts. Now among the users options include The Standard User role. Tommy Pan Fang, Program Manager, says, “This role gives a user permission to manage campaigns and perform some billing activities on specific accounts without having to be a Super Admin. Get access to only those accounts that you are responsible for, and receive notifications relevant to you.” This new role is in addition to the Super Admin, Campaign Manager, and Viewer roles, giving advertisers yet another option based on the access levels they’d like to give new users. The image below demonstrates the different access levels that are now available in Bing Ads.

“The new Standard User role has access levels in between Advertiser Campaign Manager and Super Admin. Users with this role will be able to perform all actions currently available to the Advertiser Campaign Manager, as well as manage billing-related actions at the account level like managing insertion orders and switching payment settings, without needing to be set up as a Super Admin for a customer."

DuckDuckGo Now Features Instant Answers for MLB Games: The search engine announced on April 4 in a tweet that it was, “#OpeningDay for Major League Baseball and for @BleacherReport Instant Answers.” When users search for information regarding MLB teams, they are presented with upcoming game times and previous game scores, which are generated by Bleacher Report. This feature only works for MLB teams right now.

More than Two-Thirds of US Digital Display Ad Spending is Bought Programmatically: e-Marketer predicts that US spend on programmatic will increase to $22.10 billion, a 39.7% jump from 2015. The trend continues with an estimated $27.47 billion in spend for 2017. Much of this growth is coming from mobile, a device that’s becoming increasingly important for Online Advertisers. So much so that E-Marketer predicts mobile video programmatic spend will exceed desktop in 2017.

Brands who use programmatic advertising in their marketing strategies should take note of these trends and adjust their programs accordingly. These trends are no surprise as users search behaviors are continuing to move towards mobile devices.

“Programmatic advertising continues to become more sophisticated, and spending via the media buying technique is growing, albeit at a decreasing pace. In our latest US programmatic forecast, eMarketer predicts that this year, more than two-thirds of all digital display advertising will be purchased programmatically.”

Google Now Warns You if Your Website is Not Mobile-Friendly: Next month Google is updating their algorithm that affects the ranking signal for mobile-friendly websites, and just ahead of that they’ve released a feature to show website owners whether or not their website is mobile friendly. The image below from Search Engine Land shows what website owners might see. The hyperlink, “Your page is not mobile-friendly” directs to the Google help page about having a mobile-friendly site.

“Google is now issuing a new type of warning to site owners if their site is not mobile-friendly. The new warnings show directly in the mobile search results, but only to the site owner, when Google knows that the searcher is the owner of the site.”

That’s it for this week! Check back next week for more news and updates in Online Marketing. Keep an eye out for new content on Facebook,Twitter,Google+andLinkedIn so you don’t miss out!

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